India’s $74mMars project succeeds
Staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore celebrate yesterday after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Mars. The project is cheaper than the estimated $100m spent on the movie Gravity.
INDIA won Asia’s race to Mars yesterday when its unmanned Mangalyaan spacecraft successfully entered the Red Planet’s orbit after a 10-month journey on a tiny budget.
Scientists at mission control let out wild cheers and applause after the gold-coloured craft fired its main engine and slipped into the planet’s orbit after a 660-million kilometre voyage. “History has been created. “We have dared to reach out into the unknown and have achieved the near impossible,” a jubilant Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) base near Bangalore.
“The success of our space programme is a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation,” Mr Modi said, grinning
A country that struggles to feed its people adequately should not splurge on space travel
broadly and embracing the chairman of ISRO.
The success of the mission, which is designed to search for evidence of life on the Red Planet, is a huge source of national pride as India competes with its Asian rivals for success in space.
Indians from ministers to students and office workers took to Twitter to express pride, with the Hindi slogan “JaiHind” or “Hail India” trending.
India has been trying to keep up with neighbouring giant China, which has poured billions of dollars into its programme and plans to build a manned space station by the end of the decade.
At just $74m, the mission cost is less than the estimated $100m budget of the sci-fi blockbuster Gravity. It also represents just a fraction of the cost of Nasa’s $671m Maven spacecraft, which successfully began orbiting the fourth planet from the sun on Sunday. India now joins an elite club of the US, Russia and Europe who can boast of reaching Mars. More than half of all missions to the planet have ended in failure, including China’s in 2011 and Japan’s in 2003.
No single nation had previously succeeded at its first go, though the European Space Agency, which represents a consortium of countries, pulled off the feat at its first attempt.
The probe is expected to study the planet’s surface and scan its atmosphere for methane, which could provide evidence of some sort of life form. Mangalyaan is carrying a camera, an imaging spectrometer, a methane sensor and two other scientific instruments. Indian engineers employed an unusual “slingshot” method for Mangalyaan’s voyage, which began when it blasted off from India’s southern spaceport on November 5 last year.
Lacking enough rocket power to blast directly out of Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational pull, it orbited the Earth for several weeks while building up enough velocity to break free.
Critics say a country that struggles to feed its people adequately and where roughly half have no toilets should not be splurging on space travel.